


The Sight of Other Skies

by Sixthlight



Category: Eternal Sky Trilogy - Elizabeth Bear
Genre: Female Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:50:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5467265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Samarkar comes and goes, like the seasons. Unlike the seasons, sometimes she writes Edene letters while she's away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sight of Other Skies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CenozoicSynapsid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenozoicSynapsid/gifts).



> Dear CenozoicSynapsid, I took your prompt comments about what Samarkar might do post-canon and wanting to see more of the epic sweep of the series and ran with them. I hope it's something you can enjoy!
> 
> Many thanks to Isis for a thorough and most helpful beta-read for a total stranger, and to labellementeuse for a last-minute check to calm my nerves.

Edene is no child of cities – not in the way of the cities of Song, or Rasa, or the Uthman Caliphate – even though she is Edene Khatun now, and it has been years since she has slept under even a hide tent, let alone the Eternal Sky. She sleeps under stone in Qarash more nights of the year than not, but even a Khatun can drive a cart carrying a white-house, or have it driven for her, and she is never more content than when they are on the move, her horse between her legs and her children to either side. (She has, after all, never been a married woman. It is not so strange that she still rides.)  But she has not slept under foreign skies since she carried her son on a cradleboard and soft-dawn broke over Dragon Lake. Such is the fate of Khatuns who rule in their children’s stead.

It would not occur to her to be sorry for it – there is too much to attend to in her life to spend much time on _ifs_ \- except for Samarkar, who is like the seasons. She always returns, in her time, but she always leaves, too, when restlessness sends her wandering. The Wizard Samarkar is a legend, now.  Once she went on a quest, with Re Temur Khagan, that led her from Qeshqer to Asmaracanda to Ala-Din and beyond to dead Erem. Now questers come to her, men and women, with questions they think Samarkar-la can answer, problems they think she can solve. They will brave the steppes, and winter, and the might of the Qersnyk to speak with her.

Edene thinks Samarkar was flattered, after a fashion, when they first came, flattered and startled.

“I don’t know why they think _I_ can help them,” she had confessed to Edene that evening. They had been alone in Edene’s white-house, aside from the children. “There are things I have seen, yes, but that’s not the same thing as _experience_. I am not Yongten-la. Or even Tsering-la, who has ridden a dragon. They could go to the Citadel, and yet they come here.”

“You were a princess in Song, once,” Edene had reminded her. “And they are of Song. If nothing else, it is a shorter journey to here than to Tsarepheth.” It was summer, and Edene and her children had been on the road to Qeshqer, that Samarkar calls Kashe, a city slowly rebuilt and slowly warded. Its position on the Celadon Highway was too important for it to not be resettled, but the memory of the blood-ghosts lingered, even though the bones of those who lived there had been long burned or buried under earth or sky. 

Samarkar had stirred her rice with her eating sticks – Edene had never understood why she insisted on using them - and made a face better suited to a reluctant child than a Wizard of Tsarepheth. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Edene had looked at her children, asleep in the corner of the white-house. Ganjin and Tsaagan Buqa had been in a snoring pile, Samarkar the younger on her cradleboard. She was Tsareg Edene Khatun, which she had never thought to be, and she sat in the Padparadscha Seat, and would until Ganjin was old enough to be Khagan. She had made something good of being a Queen, she thought, even the Queen of Ruined Places, but every day as Khatun was a day where she feared she might do some irreparable harm: to her son who would be Khagan, to her clan, to her people. When you ruled, the harms you did might not even be visible for years, but they were no less real for that; and she ruled as a girl, not a goddess. Never that again. “You’re not alone in that, you know.”

Samarkar had nodded, drawn in a deep breath, let it go. “I know. And we are not alone here.”

“What will you tell them, then?”

“I still don’t know,” Samarkar had admitted readily, “but I will speak to Tsering-la and Juradchai, first of all. And then we will see.”

*

They keep coming, more in summer than in winter, but coming all the same. Men and women, and once even a Cho-tsa, who wish to speak to the Wizard Samarkar. Samarkar _was_ a princess once, and knows the ways of courts. She begins to have Ümmühan the poetess speak with them before she sees them herself. Ümmühan’s poetry can touch any heart, but her real talent, Edene knows, is in the art of listening: in knowing what people say, and what they say by staying silent. She will never be easy with Edene, not with Saadet ai-Mukhtar’s death lying bloody between them, but Ümmühan and Samarkar are something like friends.

So Ümmühan only sends them on to speak to Samarkar, these questers, if she judges their need real. Most of the time the only thing Samarkar can give them is words. Sometimes nothing but words that send them onwards, or backwards, to the Citadel in Tsarepheth, to the universities of Rasa or Aezin; sometimes not Samarkar’s own words, but the words of Ato Tesefahun, or Tsering-la, or even – on occasion – Edene. The ghulim do not travel often in the lands of men, but it happens. And they are feared.

“Ümmühan thinks him desperate, not cruel,” Samarkar tells Edene of one quester. “But desperation can be as deadly, and -”

“I put their fate in their own hands, and I am responsible, somewhat,” Edene agrees. “If I can persuade him the ghulim do not mean his people harm…I will try.”

But sometimes – sometimes – it ends with Samarkar saddling Afrit, and riding off to travel under other skies, to places Edene has never been and is never likely to go, not now.

*

The first time Samarkar rides off is not the first time she has left the Qersnyk since Temur’s death. She has returned to visit her fellow wizards in the Citadel; ridden down to meet with Hong-la, wintering with his lover in Huaxing; gone once to Stone Steading, to see her brothers’ wife Payma and her niece. But this – this is the first time she has ridden off that Edene is not certain she will return.

“I _mean_ to,” Samarkar assures her. “But the road is long. I will write, if I can. If the letters return before I do.” Letters are chancy things, after all, when they rely on the goodwill of other travelers to see them to their destination.

“You had better,” Edene tells her. They were never wives to the same husband, but Samarkar has stayed with the Qersnyk for Edene’s sake as much as for Temur’s children; Ganjin is nearly as old now as Edene’s sister Sarangarel was, when Edene was stolen by blood ghosts, and he and Tsaagan Buqa race each other across the steppe on the backs of Buldshak’s get. Samarkar has given Edene the gift of her knowledge, of politics and statecraft, of magic and science. And gotten something back.

Samarkar has run from ruling again and again, but never, Edene thinks, very successfully. A part of her enjoys it. Edene has known Samarkar thrice as many years as those between when she met Temur and his death, and they have little to hide from each other anymore. Samarkar will leave for good one day, when Ganjin sits in the Padparadscha Seat, but Edene does not want that day to be yet.

“I will write,” Samarkar says again. Edene is not surprised when she does; Samarkar knows the value of her promises, but that the letters return before she does, despite the distance she goes – that makes for something of a miracle.

*

The first journey takes her south to the Lotus Kingdoms. Samarkar writes of small things, which surprises Edene at first, until she considers that Samarkar might not want to be taken for a spy. Rasa stands between the Qersnyk and the Lotus Kingdoms, but Samarkar was a princess of Rasa, once, and the delicate situation around Qeshqer constituted a peace between Rasa and the Qersnyk. For this generation, at any rate.

Edene would not have considered this, truth be told; it is Ümmühan who frames it so, when Edene tells her of Samarkar’s letter. They are not friends, no, but Ümmühan is not in the habit of lying to her when they speak. Nor does she grudge Edene her poetry, and Edene in turn does not grudge her news of Samarkar and her travels. 

So Edene learns about Samarkar’s journey, about the low flat fertile country where the Tsarethi meets the sea – _you would not like it,_ Samarkar writes, _it is half swamp and a third river and no fit country for horses_ – about the script they use to write the Bangla language, somewhat akin to Rasan but not the same, and about the people who live in the heart of the swamps, the _naga_ with their forked tongues and great tails like snakes. _They were creatures of Erem, so the stories go, but they do not poison the land as dragons do, so I think the stories are confused somewhere. They are masters of water, of channeling and controlling it, and they build fountains that Ato Tesefahun would delight to see._

Edene realizes, as she reads, that she is rubbing the stump of her finger, the one that had borne the Green Ring. _They were creatures of Erem, so the stories go_. It will follow her all her days, she is beginning to realise. The world is full of ruined places and poisonous things. So it goes.

When Samarkar returns, Ganjin is half a hand taller and Samarkar has a new scar on her forearm, only as long as her thumb but still the bright pink of a healing wound.

“What was that?” Edene asks.

Samarkar turns her arm over, revealing two more matching marks. “An eagle. Almost as large as a half-grown rukh, at that. I didn’t have room to explain in the letter.”

“Then you’re going to have to explain to an audience,” Edene tells her, and because it is summer, her white-house is spared the indignity of half the court crowding into it and Samakar tells her story under Mother Night, Ganjin’s Steel Moon and Tsaareg Buqa’s Dust Moon riding high above.

Ümmühan makes a poem of it, although in that, the eagle _does_ become a rukh. She says it sounds better.

*

Samarkar leaves again, and again, and returns every time. Her letters arrive before her, after her, often not at all. Some of the stories she comes back with Edene would not believe if it were not Samarkar telling them. She is not sure she believes some of them, even so. The _giraffes,_ south and west of Aezin, sound frankly ridiculous – spotted beasts with necks as long as their bodies, as tall as an indrik-zver - but Lady Diao swears that one of the princes in Song, one of her many sisters’ husbands,  has such a beast in his menagerie. (Diao only paints her face for great occasions now, with chalk and wax and cochineal, but she will never be quite comfortable riding like a Qersnyk woman, so it is a good thing, Edene thinks, she is married to one of Edene’s Tsareg cousins and can guide a cart instead.) The ground-turtles, however, Diao wrinkles her lovely nose at, and Edene cannot quite credit them either: as large as the dragon-turtles of Erem, Samarkar swears, but with many small hard scales for a shell, as well as a long and armoured tail, and something like the large, soft nose of the saiga antelopes which wander in their herds on the steppe. In that letter, Samarkar writes that she is bringing back the skull of one.

“Where is it?” Edene asks that winter in Qarash, when Samarkar and Afrit and Hrahima blow in with winter’s first terrible storm on their heels.

“Tsarepheth,” Samarkar tells her. “I thought the Citadel might appreciate it, and I don’t really feel the need to decorate my rooms here with skulls.”

“You mean _more_ skulls,” Edene observes, because Samarkar is too much a wizard to not have a bone or two in her quarters; she even has a small, jewel-covered artifice from Messaline, which hops and turns its beaked head as though it still lived. The children love it. Edene much prefers her eagles. Messaline, after all, was built on the ruins of Erem. 

*

Three years later, Samarkar takes off for the eastern islands, on the word of a traveller; they are as far from the Qersnyk steps as Asitaneh, if not farther, and Edene half-expects her not to return, and is quite certain any letters will go astray. But she is wrong in that, for although the eastern islands are not Uthman, some adherents of the Scholar-God live there. Word comes back with a wandering woman of the Hasitani, a priestess of sorts, if Edene understands it correctly. It is the first time she hears Ümmühan laugh in joy, when the woman arrives in Qarash.

The letter’s paper is thicker than the Song paper used on the steppe, stained with water and other, stranger colours which could be dyes, or the evidence of Samarkar’s wizardry. Edene would ask Tsering-la, who would know, but she and Jurdachai have travelled south, where there is rumour of a bad outbreak of the pox. Samarkar writes of the creatures of Yawadvipa – great orange-brown apes as large as a man but unable to speak like men or ghouls or Cho-tsa, deer the size of small dogs and great lizards as long as tigers – and of rumours, on other islands, of men the size of children. _I would doubt the last exist,_ Samarkar writes, _for I have spoken to no-one here who has seen them living, but I have seen the bones in a cave, as small as a child’s. Perhaps they are a child’s, but the skull does not look right, and I have seen enough skulls to know this. Perhaps only a child stricken by disease, but I wonder. There are stories of such a people in the jungles far to the south of Aezin, who hunt elephants with spears._

The thought of studying bones makes Edene’s flesh creep a little, despite all her years, despite her time as Queen in Erem, but Samarkar is a wizard, and wizards will make a study of anything. She has heard Samarkar and Tsering-la discussing surgery and dissections as Edene might speak of horse-breeding, with casual knowledge and in commonplace terms. 

Then again, Samarkar’s knowledge had helped deliver Lady Diao safely of her second child, so Edene does not deny its worth. She just feels no need to read about it over broth and noodles.  
  
The letter makes it sound as if Samarkar will follow close behind it, but she turns up as spring is finally getting a hold on the steppe, the ground softening, puddles remaining unfrozen overnight.

“I didn’t mean to worry you,” she tells Edene, who may have hugged her a touch too fiercely. “I just had to take a small detour through Tanah Melayu on the way back, and then we were in Song and I wintered near Wandering Mountain, and – anyway, it’s a long story.”

“Your journeys are never anything else,” Edene says, but she means it fondly. “What sort of detour?”

Samarkar’s story involves a month and a half spent with the People of the Sea – the Orang Laut, who patrol the harbours and shores in the eastern isles and hunt the great sea-lizards that threaten ships They come to land only to trade, and swim like fish.

“Crocodiles,” says Lady Diao at the mention of sea-lizards, nodding. As usual, Samarkar’s tales have attracted something of a crowd, the children at the forefront. Edene has never seen one of the great lizards herself, but she has seen them on carved screens from Song, and on one lovely vase – though on the vase, they were not half so big in relation to humans as Samarkar describes. And she had thought they were creatures of rivers, not the ocean; there are sacred crocodiles in Messaline, sunning on the banks of the great river. Ümmühan has a song about them, though it is not really about crocodiles. Very few of Ümmühan’s songs are about the things they describe, Edene has learned over the years. 

“That’s what I had expected,” Samarkar says dryly. “But no, larger than that.”

These sea-lizards, according to Samarkar, have flippers like turtles and are fully half as long as a seagoing ship – not that Edene has ever travelled on a ship, or seen one, save at a great height when the Rukh carried her over the White Sea. Samarkar’s story is about the skill of the People of the Sea at fighting them – they have wizards of a different sort, who can stay underwater and hear the sea-lizards coming from miles away – and not at all about what she was doing at the time. Edene asks her, later.

“I had a fever,” Samarkar says. “If I’d tried to do magic, then, I probably would have hurt somebody else, as well as myself. But the trouble with being the Wizard Samarkar is that I can’t tell stories anymore about how I was sick with a fever and took two weeks to stop seeing things that weren’t there. Nobody believes it, and if they do, they look disappointed.”

“Not here,” says Edene. “Everybody loves a story where the Khagan falls off his horse.”

“But it’s never a living Khagan, have you noticed?”

“Such hard work, to be a legend.”

“Yes,” says Samarkar. It is the wrong part of the year, but they both look towards the eastern part of the sky, where Temur’s stars appear. They both know the price of legends.

*

Samarkar travels west once, when Ganjin’s voice is beginning to waver perilously up and down. She goes first to Asitaneh, where she visits with Uthman Fourteenth-and-Fifteenth, and then further, past even Kyiv and Csetifon. The buildings there are stone and squat, Samarkar tells Edene, and there are bleached-white ruins that mind her of Erem, but they lie under a sky as blue as the lapis walls of the caliph’s palace, and a hot white sun.

 _The Hellenoi are supposed to be under the caliph’s rule, but the skies name that for the lie it is, though I hear that in the time of Uthman Twelfth, they were under an Uthman sky,_ Samarkar writes. _They grow olives for oil and raise sheep for white cheese, and most of their libraries  were carted off long ago to Asitaneh and Asmaracanda to be copied for the Scholar-God’s glory. They have a race here who are men and horse both, living in their mountains – I have met some of them, lest you think it just a story - and do you know, they believe that the Qersnyk are of that race, too._

That is not the first time Edene has heard that story – the Kyivvans put it about, too, Ato Tesefahun had once said – but she had not known that there existed a place where the horse-men were real. When she reads the letter to the children, who are old enough now to demand news of Samarkar-la but not patient enough to pass it among themselves and read it, they laugh and laugh and spend  the rest of the day playing at being horse-men, unable to dismount. Jokes are never quite as funny as you get older, Edene reflects, as they are at that age.

*

The memory of that game is strong in Edene’s mind the day she watches Ganjin ride off with his bride, his true name newly whispered in the girl’s ear. Samarkar is in Qarash for the wedding; she squeezes Edene’s hand, once, as she had at Temur’s funeral long ago.

“What now?” Edene asks her later that night, after the feasting is done. “Where do you ride to next?”

“I,” says Samarkar, and Edene knows her time here is at last done; Samarkar means to say she will return to the Citadel, to Rasa. She has never really been Qersnyk, no matter how long she has kept returning to them. Re Ganjin is Khagan, and men and women who have never known a sky without Re Temur’s stars in it are parents themselves, if new ones. Edene has known this day was coming for years, accepted it, but she is surprised to discover how much, even so, it feels like a wound. Like a loss.

“I mean to visit Dragon Lake,” Samark says, instead of _I am leaving_. “I have some questions for Joyful Dawn Agate Slumbering, if he will answer them, and I have knowledge as tribute to bring him. Dragons hoard it, you know, as much as gold. And then…I am not sure.”

“You mean to return to Tsarepheth?”

Samarkar reaches up to touch her wizard’s collar; Edene wonders if she knows she is doing it. “Perhaps. Edene...you have some youth left to you that I do not. And I…I miss Tsarepheth, you know. The hot springs, and the mist over the Wreaking, and the flags in the breeze. It has been long enough…Yangchen-tsa will have no quarrel, I think, if I return to the citadel.”

“You speak of youth, but I’m not sure I feel it,” Edene says. She has had grey in her hair ever since she wore the Green Ring. More than Samarkar’s, for all Samarkar must have been a lanky adolescent when Edene came into the world. “But of course you miss your people. I understand.”

Edene dreamed, when she was a girl – before the blood-ghosts, before Temur – of a husband, and a white-house, and mares and cattle grazing contentedly to the horizon. She never dreamt to leave the steppe. She has worked, inch by inch, for those things. Not for herself, not quite as she had dreamt it, but for her cousins and her clan, for _all_ the clans. For her son to be secure in the Padparadscha Seat. After everything, after being born who he was and as he was, there had been nowhere else safe for him to be. She had considered it, briefly, treacherously, after Bansh had carried Temur into the sky and she had realised what laid before her – what it would take, to make Ganjin Khagan. She had considered just…leaving. Samarkar would have given them shelter in Rasa. Ato Tesefahun would have taken his great-grandson, and his great-grandson’s mother, to his home in Csetifon.

But Edene is Qersnyk, and after everything, she had wanted to be home, with her clan, with her family. Now…now, she wonders what might have happened if she had left.

As if reading her mind, Samarkar speaks. “You could come with me, you know. To visit. You’ve never been to Tsarepheth, and the journey is not so long as all that.”

“I can’t leave now,” Edene says. “Not with Ganjin’s rule so new. If there is trouble, with the northern principalities in Song, or out near the Caliphate -”

“Maybe that’s the reason you should leave, for a little while,” Samarkar says shrewdly. “It can be…dangerous…when dowagers remain and their sons are adult. Not that I think your new daughter-in-law has it in mind to poison you, nor any other wife your son takes, but…”

“This is not Rasa, or Song. Re Ganjin is Khagan; the shaman-rememberers say so. Nobody else has raised their banner, and the Re clan’s moons ride in the sky. I expect he will look to me for counsel for many years to come, but it will not be quite so…political.”

Samarkar nods, but there is a glint in her eyes that suggests perhaps it is Edene’s ability to step away from power she worries about. Edene finds that most unfair. If anybody can let go of power, when they must – she realises she is rubbing the stump of the finger she has not had these twenty years.

 “I’m sorry,” Samarkar says. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I know your duties as well as you do. And I don’t mean to provoke you into telling me you don’t have any -”

Edene laughs. “I am not a girl to be provoked, so, not anymore. You’ve nothing to apologise for.”

She would have, the girl snatched by the blood-ghosts. Been provoked, that is. Edene knows her own weaknesses. She has worn them down with patient practice, like rock eroded by running water. She cannot afford to be brash, or impulsive, or speak her mind untempered.

But Samarkar – who has helped her be the person she needs to be, all these years – makes her wish she could be that girl again. Just once.

Maybe…maybe she can.

*

Samarkar is not returning to Tsarepheth alone; she has an escort of traders riding west to Qeshqer, where she will find more moving onwards to Tsarepheth in this easy season for travelling. It is a young girl who comes across Edene first, where she waits a few miles outside Qarash. Edene is riding her newest-broken mare, with the mare’s gelded brother as her remount. Edene has not thought up a name, yet, but she thinks one will come to her on the journey.

The girl – much of an age with Samarkar-the-younger – does not recognise Edene, it is clear.

“I am waiting for Samarkar-la,” Edene explains. “She is travelling with your family, yes?”

“Yes,” says the girl. “Shall I ride back and tell her you are waiting?”

“No,” Edene says. “It’s a surprise.”

The girl hides a smile with her hand, but Edene is older, and clearly alone – that had been a trick to manage, and Edene is quite proud of it – so she rides back, to tell her family the way is clear. Not that it should be anything else, this close to Qarash, after this many years of peace. Edene has some pride in that, too.

“What,” Samarkar says when she finally arrives, “are you doing here?” She all but puts her hands on her hips. Edene manages to keep a straight face at her exasperation.

“I thought I might like to see Tsarepheth,” says Edene, looking up at Samarkar. “See some different skies, for a little while. Even if they are only the skies of Rasa. I walked in Erem, once. I escaped the rock of Ala-Din. I have ridden the Qersnyk steppe from end to end, and been Khatun. I wish to be Tsareg Edene, for a while, and see another sky. And if I do not return – well, one day, I will not, whether it is from Tsarepheth or a ride around camp, or from sleeping in my own white-house. Re Ganjin will be Khagan nevertheless, and his wife knows his name.”

Samarkar takes in her remount, and the full saddlebags on both horses. “You’re quite serious about this.”

“Will your fellow travellers mind the company?”

They are a little spread out, close to the safety of Qarash; nobody has stopped to listen to Samarkar talk to a woman with grey in her hair, standing by the road.

“I don’t believe so.” Samarkar shakes her head a little, then laughs. “It’s my own fault, after all.”

Edene vaults onto her mare. Perhaps not as smoothly as she might have in her youth, but she is not old. Not quite yet.

“I’ll race you to the next marker,” she says. “I’ll wager on Buldshak’s get over Afrit’s, any day.”

“Well,” says Samarkar-la. “Let’s see about that, shall we?”

 

 


End file.
